And how to work it into your busy schedule.
When it comes to fat loss, everyone focuses on nutrition and exercise. And yes, they’re critical. But there’s another critical component to fat loss that many of us ignore.
No, I’m not trying to sell you a new supplement. I’m talking about a simple activity that everyone can do right now — no equipment or gym membership required.
Your calories and you
There are four main ways our bodies burn calories. The net sum of these activities is your Total Daily Energy Expenditure (TDEE).
I’ll talk about the first three then dive into the fourth that we usually ignore.
The largest calorie expenditure comes from your metabolism, measured as your Basic Metabolic Rate (BMR). This is the rate at which your cells burn energy just to keep you alive and breathing.
BMR represents 60 to 80 percent of your total energy expenditure in a day. It is a highly individualized figure and hard to measure accurately without specialized equipment. It will differ based on gender, height, weight, and age.
Next up is the Thermic Effect of Food (TEF). Yep, it takes calories to digest calories! You burn around 10% of your daily calories through this.
The third category is Exercise Activity Thermogenesis (EAT). These are the calories you burn through exercising — be it cardio or anaerobic exercises such as weightlifting. That adds between 5–10% to your TDEE.
Can you control your calorie burn?
Of these three categories, the one you can most control is EAT. An hour of cardio will add between 500 and 700 calories to your total daily calorie burn.
However, the amount of extra exercise you can do is limited by your body and your available time. Additionally, if you go too hard, you’ll need to eat more to replenish your body’s energy stores. You may need an additional 408 to 680 calories for every additional hour of exercise.
In other words, an additional hour of exercise may be net-neutral in terms of fat burning.
Web sites are chock full of articles about raising your BMR. Sadly, most of them are junk science.
The most effective way to raise your metabolism is to add muscle. Muscle is metabolically active and requires energy to sustain.
Some sites claim this will burn up to 100 calories per kg of muscle. In reality, it’s more like 4.5 to 7 calories per pound. (Fat is also metabolically active but only burns 2 calories per pound.)
What’s more, most of us can’t pack on a ton of muscle in a year. The average is around 4 to 7 pounds a year.
Let’s assume you’re a genetic wunderkind and pack on 15 pounds. You’ll add a whopping 105 calories/day to your metabolism. That’s basically an apple a day. Definitely not enough to make a piece of cake a daily dietary staple.
Want another slap in the face? Your metabolism slows down as you age. So even if you do rev it a little, aging will counter the increase.
The Thermic Effect of Food is what it is. You can raise it a little by eating more protein, which takes more energy to burn.
Most of the other tricks online for “raising metabolism” — drinking ice water, eating spicy foods, etc. — are usually transient and do little to boost your overall TDEE.
EAT with an N
So, your TDEE is largely fixed and you can only affect it in small ways.
Sucks, huh?
Fortunately, there’s one critical category we haven’t talked about, and that’s NEAT.
Short for Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis, it’s the number of calories that you burn through any activity that isn’t specifically exercising. This includes everything from walking to housework to even fidgeting in your seat.
The major benefit of NEAT is that it doesn’t exhaust us the same way that exercise does. Activities like housework and walking are low-stress and don’t beat us down the same way as, say, weightlifting or running.
In other words, you can — and should — pile on the NEAT.
As a result, some studies, such as this one from the Mayo Clinic, have concluded that NEAT is an important component of obesity management. Mayo researchers found that NEAT can — depending on size and weight — burn up to an additional 2,000 calories daily beyond your basal metabolic rate.
A caveat here, though. The number of calories burned through NEAT varies wildly from person to person. (It’s that pesky “everyone has a unique metabolism” jazz.) The metabolic difference can be as high as 2,000 calories a day.
(Don’t rely on your smartwatch to track your calorie burn, either. Their calorie trackers are about as “smart” as a stopped clock and can be off by up to 40%.)
My experience sneaking more caloric burn into my day
If you work a job that involves moving, your NEAT is already pretty high. Workers in the service industry, retail, construction, nursing, and similar jobs can burn over 1,000 extra calories a day.
Sadly for me, I work an office job. It pays well, so I’ve little desire to quit. (“Why’d you leave tech to work at Starbucks?!” “I did it for the NEAT.”)
But I can still sneak in a lot of NEAT throughout my day. Some things I’ve tried — and some ideas I really want to mix in — include:
Morning walk. If I have time before my AM strength training workout, I’ll get in a quick 30-minute walk. It helps me to wake up. Plus, I can practice walking meditation and kill two birds with one stone.
Walking during meetings. This has gotten harder as office jobs are demanding more camera time in virtual meetings. But if I know I’ll be listening more than speaking in a meeting, I grab my headphones, disable my camera, and talk on the go.
Walking breaks. I use the remainder of my lunch hour after eating to get in a quick 20- to 30-minute walk in my neighborhood. I take shorter walks during the am and pm as well.
I aim to get in at least 10,000 steps every day to jack up my NEAT burn. Yes, that’s an arbitrary number. But there’s no downside to going above and beyond the call of duty here.
Ruck it. I sometimes up my calorie expenditure on my walks by using a weighted rucksack. Rucking can make a vigorous walk almost as efficient as jogging!
Housework breaks. I work from home so, when I’m feeling my body tense up, I take 10 minutes and do something productive around the house — laundry, vacuuming, dishes, taking out the trash.
Standing. Standing requires between 100 and 200 calories an hour. By contrast, sitting burns a mere 60 to 130.
This is something I used to do a lot at work when I had an adjustable desk. I’m looking into buying a cheap one so I can replicate this at home. For now, I’ve raised my camera up off my desk so I can stand during meetings that require face time.
The treadmill desk. You can REALLY take your NEAT to the next level by installing a small treadmill underneath your standing desk. Get in your steps while doing your everyday work tasks!
Be NEAT
With NEAT, a little goes a long way. If you can burn an extra 200 calories a day, that translates into 20 pounds shed within a year.
There are a ton of other ways to increase your NEAT:
- Park farther away from the store and walk
- Do a power walk through the mall
- Play with your kids
No matter how hectic your life, you can find a way to build more NEAT into your day.
